Only on a Friday
by Bleu
Summary: Finally finished! My very angsty, dark, Addisoncentric musings about...a lot of things. Read, enjoy if you can, and review if you want. Thanks!
1. Friday

"**Only on a Friday"**

**by Bleu**

** (Oh, and it's angsty. You've been warned.)  
**

* * *

In that last year, Friday became the worst.

She knew Monday was the traditional, stereotypical worst day of the week, expounded upon again and again every Monday in subways as the working class packed themselves into the dingy, slightly odorous cars and began the depressing sojourn to their respective offices, in high schools as students shuffled morosely to their classrooms flooded with self-consciousness and discontentment, and even in hospitals, when doctors would mutter and grumble as they changed from their civilian garb and replaced it with the crinkled, papery scrubs.

And she had to admit—Mondays _were_ hard.

Usually she went in early, to get a start on the mandatory Monday paperwork. It made her stir-crazy, sitting in her office, squinting painfully behind the lens of her glasses, proofreading, notating, signing…after a few hours, her eyes would be spinning in her head, and she knew then she needed to get out. That was why she liked to schedule one or two surgeries for Monday afternoons, just to give her an excuse to escape her confinement.

But once all that was over, since it was usually late by that point and she was too weary to cook or do much of anything else, she would pick up take out for dinner, and include a special something as a guilt-free reward for surviving Monday—usually of the sinful, creamy, chocolate variety. And just that would take the sting out of Mondays.

No…in comparison to Friday, Monday was barely a contender for worst day of the week.

Plus, since it was so late by the time she usually got home on Mondays, he was almost always home before her, home when she got there. Even if it wasn't exactly marital bliss, it was still company. If she wanted to see him, hear his voice, touch him, he was there.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays were typically intensive surgery days, for some reason. She didn't know if it was that way for all surgeons, or it just so happened more babies were born on those days, but that's how it fell for her. She got home at different times depending, but usually after a busy Tuesday and Wednesday, she was so tired she went right to bed.

Sometimes he was already home, and sometimes he wasn't. But because her sleep was deep and immediate, like a coma, it stopped mattering.

Thursdays were probably her favorite day of the week, for her entire life, probably because she always had an inclination—slight, of course—to stubborn contrariness. Because Friday was always the touted "Best Day of the Week," she always felt Thursday became overshadowed by it. Really, Thursday was the most balanced day in her life. She would prepare a little paperwork first thing for the Friday meetings, attend one or two surgical follow-ups, and then go to the hospital board meeting in the afternoon and early evening. It was always calmly paced but efficient and accomplishing. Then, she would come home, make something herself, watch _Friends_, and by the time that was over, he would be home.

Thursday seemed to be his favorite day, too. Even in the last year, they both just seemed more at ease on Thursdays. Talking came easier, as did laughing, and sometimes, even sex, though that became rarer and rarer. But for most of that last year, Thursday was her favorite day of the week.

And, despite the tradition, in that last year, Fridays became the worst.

Maybe it was all the hype. She blamed it on that for a while. "Thank God it's Friday" was like a mantra, heard everywhere by anyone with any type of job. Hell, they even named a restaurant and subsequent pop culture staple on it. But really, what was so great about Friday? Sure, it was the end of the week. Sure, it was a day to meet your friends at a bar for happy hour and vent about the hellish week you had. Sure, it meant that for two days, there would be no—or less—work.

But when work was more than just a job, when work began to act as a kind of anesthetic, Fridays lost their charm. Hell, they became torture.

Pain is never clearer, deeper, or more damaging than it is in the moments right after the anesthetic wears off.

For Addison, Fridays were the end of her anesthetic.

Prior to that last year, nothing particularly specific had ever befallen her on a certain Friday to make her scorn the day so much. She worked a rather unpredictable schedule at the hospital, mainly with consults, but that didn't bother her. She just never felt quite at ease on Fridays. Everywhere she went, she didn't want to be. Even if it was a particularly riveting case, or lunch with Derek, or anything she would normally look forward to, it only filled her with a restlessness, and made the entire day one filled with latent dissatisfaction and as a result, unpleasantness.

And in that last year, Fridays got worse and worse with each passing week.

Because her day was relatively undemanding, she wouldn't be as weary as usual. She would try to wear herself out by going to the gym and running hard and fast until her lungs burned and her whole body felt rubbery, but after a scalding shower, she was even more awake. This seemed to feed her restlessness, in a way.

Derek worked late on Fridays. So late he worked that sometimes—often, in fact—he didn't come home until after dawn.

So on Fridays, unfailingly, _especially_ in that last year, when Addison arrived home, the brownstone would be filled with that specific, stale, stagnant air that fills a place when it has been empty for a while, that nothing—aside from warm, breathing, living bodies—was able to extinguish. And if a person were to stay too long in that environment by him or herself, the smell had a way of clinging, announcing to the world that person's aloneness.

In the past, her remedy would be to change into something sleek and expensive, call Savvy, meet her at some bar or hotspot, and wash that smell off of her with an tasteful number of dirty martinis, a heavy dose of girlish giggling and gossip, and innocent flirting with attractive strangers. She would come home a little drunk and very sleepy, able to fall into that same comatose slumber that protected her from loneliness during the week.

But in that last year, she stopped going out with Savvy on Fridays. Savvy, alive and vibrant and content and funny and happily married, made Addison realize—though she didn't consciously acknowledge it—everything that she and her life was not. So she stopped.

At first, she would bring work home. Then, she began investing in various subscriptions to medical journals, reading them with intense concentration on the cushy leather furniture in the living room, usually with the television or stereo blaring in the background and take out of some kind cooling in its cartons on the glass coffee table. This practice would last well into the night, and often she woke up with her face in a journal, the television on, and her body very, very cold.

If she was lucky, this wouldn't occur until Saturday morning, and in response she would saunter up to their bedroom to find Derek facedown in the pillows, snoring softly. Only when he was there could she bring herself to ease her body in between the sheets and sleep. If he wasn't, she pulled the comforter from the bed and went back to the couch.

After a while, no amount of medical research or editorials could make her drowsy. She'd finish, and it would be far from dawn, and she would be painfully alert and awake. That would be when the worst would happen. In the vast emptiness of the house, she would cry, but the sound of her sobs and sniffling would barely travel beyond her immediate person. After all, no one was there to hear them, and furniture and walls and hardwood floors could provide no solace. After she would finish, if she did, she would be nearly paralyzed with loneliness, often resorting to simply staring out the window, watching blindly as Manhattan teemed outside the window. This began about six months into that last year.

That's when she got the prescription for Ambien.

She didn't think anything of it. She was indeed not sleeping. Not just was she not sleeping, but also she was unable to even force herself to. A sleep aid was a sound medical decision.

But when she found herself refilling it two, three, and then four times, and increasing her dose ever so slightly, she knew she was descending down a slippery slope. So she stopped the prescription.

That's when she discovered a taste for Sambuca.

As a rule, she never drank during the week. And in the past, her Friday nights with Savvy culminated with a maximum of three cocktails. She held her liquor well, but she still never liked to push it.

But one evening, post-Ambien, she had been rummaging through the liquor cabinet in the den, mostly full of single malt scotch for Derek, and discovered the bottle of Sambuca, tucked away and still wrapped in the red bow it had been when they had brought it back from Italy.

Lacking the appropriate glassware to drink the drink simply in shots, she would barely fill the base of a snifter, and drink. In the beginning, it took two of these to make her drowsy enough that if she laid down in front of mindless television, she would be asleep within the hour. After a few weeks, it took four. Then six.

The last Friday, _the _Friday to forever make Friday the worst day ever, she had eight.

In her dizzying haze of alcohol, when she heard the doorbell, she had immediately thought it to be Derek. It didn't occur to her he probably wouldn't ring the doorbell of his own house.

She had just emerged from the shower and had neglected to dress. She pulled her white satin robe tighter around her body when she opened the door in an effort ward off the outward chill of the damp autumn night and maintain her inner alcohol-induced warmth.

She had to blink several times and work with difficulty to focus before she registered the identity of the man standing before her speaking. She knew it wasn't Derek, and it took her only a few more seconds of close examination through bleary eyes to see it was Mark.

She didn't quite hear him, and by the time she concentrated enough to listen, he had stopped speaking.

"Addison? Are you all right?" She heard that.

She attempted to speak, but instead nodded slowly.

He stepped closer. He had that frosty scent of someone entering the indoors for the first time in a while, a combination of the city streets, the fall air, his cologne, and a plethora of other unidentifiable aromas. His hands were cold when he put them on her shoulders and frowned into her eyes.

"Have you been drinking? Alone?" he asked carefully, as if he couldn't actually imagine that to be the truth.

This time, she found words. Well, one. "Yes."

She wasn't sure if he spoke again, but she was sure he looped his arm around her waist and smoothly guided her up the stairs. She smiled dreamily, mistaking him occasionally on their walk for Derek.

When they approached the bedroom, she stopped the limited motion she was granting to her legs. He stopped too, and gazed at her in confusion.

"Addie, are you okay? Are you going to be sick?"

Her face fell. No, he wasn't Derek. He was Mark.

That thought, that _damning _thought, was her last thought for the rest of the evening. People often say, "I wasn't thinking," but in Addison's case it was literal. Everything that happened from that point on was simply movement.

She knew she kissed him. She knew he tried to stop her.

She knew she persisted, but she didn't think about it.

She knew he was holding her, carrying her to the bedroom, but she didn't think about it.

She knew he was laying her with unusual gentleness onto the bed, but she didn't think about.

She even knew when her robe was gone and his hands were on her, but she didn't think about it.

She didn't think about a single thing until that potent, terrifying, sobering instant when her eyes opened amid ecstasy and saw Mark above her—sweating, breathing, moving—but also, in the distance, blurred by alcohol and sex, saw Derek.

_That look_, that obscene contortion of betrayal, disgust, and pain on his face and the exquisite self-hatred that flooded her heart at that moment killed Friday for her. Definitely, permenantly, for the rest of her life.

* * *

**Note: This was meant to be a little innocent drabble, inspired by a particularly soggy, drizzly, somber day here in Philadelphia, but it kind of took on a life of its own. It's all angsty, but I kind of like it, and I might continue. Hmm…**

**I love reviews and feedback and the such, but its more important that everybody enjoy it. So do that first. : )**


	2. Saturday

After Friday, it naturally became Saturday.

In the last year before Derek left, Saturday had been filled obsessively with working out, cleaning, grocery shopping, picking up or dropping off dry cleaning, painting the living room, and many other activities of the like that occupied her entire being but allowed her mind a considerable amount of dormancy.

The day that most of her activity was mundane, banal, ritualistic. She spoke only to accomplish tasks. She did not think more than was necessary to finish whatever she was physically doing. On Saturday, she busied herself to an unfathomable degree of occupation so that if someone wanted to talk to her, see her, or anything, she could say, "I'm busy," or "I'm just in the middle of something," legitimately.

It was an easy, detached way of existing.

And in the time after Derek left, it became her lifestyle.

She didn't feel the pain, because she was too busy.

Her surgery record soared.

She won an election onto the hospital's ethics board.

The house—she had stopped calling it home—was never dirty.

She worked out every day, and her body was in the best physical shape of her life.

Her refrigerator was better stocked than ever before. It didn't matter if the food went bad after a few days because she stopped eating—it was there. And when it went bad, she had an excuse to leave and buy more.

She bought more clothes in those months than she had since she graduated medical school.

She had never attended as many benefits, hospital functions, or house-warming/engagement/baby showers in her adult life.

She repainted the entire brownstone before she sold it, which took less than two weeks.

When she began staying—not _living_, staying—at Mark's, the project of cleaning his previously deplorable bachelor pad had kept her busy for the entire first weekend. Not that she noticed.

Every day was Saturday. She didn't note passage of time, or much of anything, on Saturdays.

Until Friday came again.

She could still see Mark as he was on this particular Friday.

He wore a blue silk shirt, with a matching tie loosely knotted on his chest. His pants were black, as were his shoes. His hair was longer then, in need of a trim, curling a little more around the ends than he normally let it. He had facial hair, for her unexpressed desire.

When he stood in the doorway of the bedroom, one arm leaning against the doorframe and the other casually tucked in his pocket, the light shining from the living room, giving him a Hitchcockian silhouette as she looked from the darkened bedroom, accentuated his admirable physique.

She spared him only a glance when she realized his presence, and without a word, went back to packing.

"What are you doing?" he asked calmly, though his voice betrayed his worry. She did things like this sometimes—he would come back to the apartment and she would be sitting, awake in the dark. Or she would have every light in the house on and be asleep. Or she would simply not speak, unless absolutely pressed. He chalked it up to her moodiness. She had never been particularly placid, and her life with in a tailspin at the moment. He resented it, sometimes, because he tried so hard to make it better for her, but only sometimes. Most of the time, he just worried for and about her.

He was worried that night.

This particular somber stupor had lasted a week.

After no response from her, he flicked on the bedroom light.

She stopped packing, straightened from her stooped position, but didn't turn back to face him.

"Addison, what the hell is going on?" he demanded, stepping into the room slowly, assessing with shock the scene before him.

She looked at down at the Donna Karan dress in her hands.

"I'm leaving." She said simply. She had hoped she would have been gone before he had arrived home. She'd already planned the perfectly stated message she would leave him upon arriving in Seattle. Too bad.

"I…see that. Where are you going?"

She swallowed.

"Seattle."

A few brief moments of silence passed before she heard a violent thud to her left. She didn't have to look to know he had just thrown a shoe at the wall.

"I knew you'd go." He growled. "After Webber called, I just _knew_…"

"Then why the theatrics?" she asked calmly, turning finally, but moving past him to pick up her fallen Manolo Blahnik. He was watching her, clenching and unclenching his fists. She moved past him again, and felt the heat permeating from his rage.

"Why…who…what…Addison…" he tried to form some question, but was unable. Especially with her just walking around casually, folding things ever so calmly, and neatly packing them in the suitcase. When she tried to get her moisturizer from the dresser behind him, he grabbed both of her arms by the elbows and forced her to be still.

As he held her, his eyes bore into hers with anger, and most notably, hurt. She had seen that hurt before. She had experienced it. And it was razor sharp. She closed her eyes to escape it, but couldn't. Mark was there, more a presence to her than anyone had ever been, and his pain was palpable.

When she opened her eyes, a sheen of tears glistened over them.

"What?" she whimpered miserably, losing her grip on her Saturday detachment. It was Friday, again.

"Why are you going back to him?" Mark demanded, desperately, pulling her closer so their noses practically touched, shaking her slightly with each sentence. "He left you here. Alone. In pieces. He didn't want to work on it, he didn't even want to talk to you."

"Because I have to go, Mark, Richard has a case…"

"This isn't about a case and you know it. You're running back to him!"

"You know I got the divorce papers!"

He let out a rueful laugh.

"That you haven't signed. That you'll hand him wearing the wedding rings you saved, and hid in the back of your jewelry box." He said darkly. She yanked herself free of him, shoved past to the bed, grabbed the suitcase, and threw it at him. He caught it, barely managing to keep his balance.

"Look, look inside and see. They're in there. Waiting for him to sign. What does it matter if I haven't yet?" she demanded, fiery tears burning her cheeks. She didn't address the wedding rings he had been right about.

"Because, Addison, if you really wanted this to happen, you would have signed them months ago, and had them served to him there. There is no need for you to fly across the country! But you are, because you still love him." He threw the suitcase to the floor between them. "You still love him, even after he left you."

In the time it took him to rage at her, the icy veneer of detachment had reformed.

"You don't know everything." She informed him bitterly, bending down to gather the strewn clothes, spilled papers, and upturned suitcase and place them back on the bed.

"Fine." He returned, grabbing her hand once it was empty and turning her. "Then say it."

Her eyes widened and her face flushed.

"What?"

"You know." He implored with bitterness, holding her hand in a deathly tight grip. "Say you don't love him."

She felt, suddenly, like she was going to be sick.

In the months since he had left, she had thought of Derek only as an absence. It had virtually been a waiting game until he would surface again. It was Saturday, a day full of meaningless activities with no other purpose in the week than to allow for those activities to be fulfilled and then end, making way for another day.

"I have to make the flight." She replied coolly. He closed his eyes.

"Fine." He let her hand go, and she took to busily stuffing things into the bag. Neatness didn't matter. She needed to be gone, out of Mark's presence, as soon as possible.

When she had concluded with that suitcase and maneuvered around the bed to retrieve another, she felt the bones in her hands shake, a strange nervous phenomena she had noticed in high school right before she would play in the band. With each move, she felt a pulsing unsteadiness. It had been overcome in her years as a surgeon, and its resurface now alarmed her.

When she came from the walk-in closet holding another bag, Mark was still leaning with his back against the dresser, his hands on either side of his head, pressing and kneading with force. She accidentally brushed him when she moved, and he grabbed her again.

"Stop man handling—," his mouth covered hers before anything else could be said.

His kiss was always a surprise to her. Maybe it was years of him being her and Derek's best friend that she couldn't picture Mark kissing her. Maybe it was the gut instinct she had always had and fought thinking about when he smiled, picturing his mouth against hers. But it always made her freeze for a moment, even in the most casual setting.

Now, it froze her, but his busy hands did not. He possessively clung to her hips, holding her against him in a nearly inescapable position. All she could do to distance herself from him was press her hands into his chest, but all that accomplished was to notify her of his pounding heart. Whether it was panic or arousal, she couldn't tell, but she knew if she allowed this much longer…

She finally, after what seemed to be a long stretch of time, dug the heels of her palms into his chest. After one final oral attack, he allowed her to push him away. She blinked, her eyes blurred by tears and desire, and regarded his face. Her lipstick had made a hue of pink appear on his lips, and his eyes were cloudy and unsettled. But not in a way that frightened her. In a way that made her want to comfort him, and allow herself to be comforted by him.

Dangerous, dangerous thinking.

"I'm going…to miss my flight."

She didn't look into his eyes when she said it. She stared at his face, but not his eyes. She only knew of his surrender because the weight of his hands and the heat from his body withdrew. She didn't know what else she packed—she filled the Vuitton suitcase on the bed, collected the other two, and left.

She wasn't sure even if they said good-bye. She doubted it.

A charming, clean-cut, stockbroker type had helped her stow her bags on the airplane. She wondered if he was trying to pick her up, or if he just noticed how badly she was shaking. When he let a hand pass over her backside as she stretched to close the compartment, she knew his motive.

Luckily, he was easily put off. Lucky for him, really.

After the ritual greetings and customary warnings crackled and popped over the speakers, a tall, lanky, dark-haired man in his early twenties, marinated in one of those pungent Abercrombie and Fitch scents and hair gel, made his way over to Addison, adjusting his uniform self-consciously.

"Can I get you something, Miss?" he added hopefully, obviously enamored. She couldn't imagine why. She hadn't seen a mirror in ages, not really. She decided she would have to, before the plane landed.

"Miss?" he asked again, an eyebrow hooking in curiosity.

Back to the present.

"Would you like a drink? We have an extensive selection of wine and spirits."

She blinked, and tried to think of what she could drink.

Alcohol hadn't passed her lips in months. Living like she had would not have been feasible with alcohol. She relied too much on schedule, on performance, on shallow existence. Alcohol hindered obviously schedules and performances therein, but it also had a nasty, nasty way of causing her to, among other atrocities, introspect. And she hadn't made room for that in months. Not since that fateful Friday when she had last seen Derek.

And now, she was going to see Derek _again_. She would be married _again_. She would blot her feelings for Mark _again_. It was really a return, of sorts, from a very long hold.

And most of all, it was Friday.

So, in honor of a return to her marriage and to Friday, her choice was obvious.

"Sambuca, please." She ordered, disregarding the offered menu. "Straight up."

When he went to retrieve her order, she slipped her wedding rings from her pocket and ceremoniously slid them back on.

* * *

**Note: So…that's that. Meredith Grey isn't the only dark and twisty woman around here anymore! At least, not in my world.  
**


	3. Sunday

When she was a child, every Sunday her grandmother took her to church.

Catherine Montgomery had mournfully accepted long before that she could not force her grown son and his Protestant wife to go to St. Paul's Catholic Church on Sundays. She stopped making an overt issue about it after they had married, for fear of alienating herself. But as long as she was charged with caring for her only granddaughter while her son and his wife slept off their Saturday nights well into Sunday afternoons or evenings, she would take Addison to church.

Catherine's rules were simple. A dress, nice shoes, and a hat to cover her hair.

None of the other little girls covered their hair. It was an archaic tradition in the Roman Catholic Church, even in Addison's earliest youth. But since Catherine had always been required to cover her hair, Addison was too. It was common among the old women Catherine knew, who not only wore ridiculous hats but sometimes even veils, who smelled like talc and Chanel, and congregated at the entrance of the cathedral before and after mass to cluck away. Only them, and Addison, would cover their hair. The little girls in Addison's Sunday school class were very quick to point that out, and relentless in it.

Once, when she was eight, in a rare act of rebellion, Addison got rid of the horrific hat her grandmother had purchased for the very purpose, so Catherine had made her cover her hair with a tissue for the entire mass, and took her out right after to buy another, which had managed to be even more horrific.

She never acted out again, even though she thought it was stupid that the sight of her hair somehow offended God.

The truth was, Addison found a lot of stupid things within the church.

She didn't know why it was any business of a priest if she lied.

She didn't know how Jesus managed to _be _the stale bread they took every week.

She didn't know why of all the churches, God was only present in _theirs_.

But, like she didn't mention her true feelings about her hat, she never said a word about anything else, either. If she did, Catherine would be upset, and might even stop coming to get Addison on Sunday mornings.

That fear was stronger than any objection Addison might have had to the church.

Some Sundays, if Catherine was sick or out of town, and Addison was forced to stay home, she remained in her room all day. She wouldn't leave to take a bath or even eat until she was sure her parents were awake and about, cleaning up the disaster that was always left from their Saturday night parties.

Stained glasses, ashtrays brimming with cigarette butts, and the scent of stale cologne, perfume, sex, and on a few occasions, vomit.

Those were the kinds of things Addison could expect to be waiting for her if she went into the downstairs of her parents' brownstone on Sunday mornings.

On the mornings Catherine didn't come and she could not simply avoid looking into the living room as she darted out the door, she only maintained her composure by not going down there until her parents could at least clean up a little bit.

But that wasn't even the worst of it.

The worst part was her parents themselves. Battered by alcohol and out of the company of anyone who truly mattered, they were stripped of any ability or desire to even pretend to care about her. She looked into her mother's bloodshot, bleary eyes on those mornings and the hollowed vacuous look of them made her sick to her stomach. Rose Montgomery existed only to please her husband, no matter what it did to her or her daughter.

Jack Montgomery, Addison's father, offered no comfort—if anything, the emotions that churned in his emerald eyes were worse. They didn't possess the bleak emptiness of her mother's, but a striking, specific indifference. Her mother almost seemed unaware of her existence at times—her father was more than aware, and simply didn't care.

After a while, Addison stopped looking at him. It was just easier not to look at either of them.

It was easier to just swallow her objections, put on a façade, and go to Church with Catherine.

But either way, she was a fraud. If she was with her parents, she was a fraud because she didn't look at them or ask them for the love she so horribly longed for, and if she was with Catherine, she was a fraud because she recited psalms she thought were stupid and prayed to a God that she didn't believe in.

Ever since then, Sunday for Addison was a day built on denial.

Denial of her feelings, denial of her thoughts, and denial of her desires.

As she got older, it became easier. Holding it in, encasing herself in a wall of cool, aloof, intelligence and taciturnity, became easier.

By the time she married Derek, it was a habit.

By the time he left her, it was second nature.

By the time she divorced him, it was a necessity for survival.

In those few months in which they attempted a reconciliation, every day was Sunday. The denial eventually grew to such a degree, she was able to deny not only the truth about herself, but also about her husband.

She made herself blind to the longing in his gaze when he looked at Meredith. He chose _her_. He loved _her._

She made herself deaf to the worry in his voice when he spoke to Meredith. He chose _her_. Her loved _her._

She made herself desensitized to his indifferent lovemaking with her. He chose _her_. He loved _her_.

She made herself unaware of the smell of Meredith on him when he returned to her on Prom night. He chose _her_. He loved _her_.

Even when she held Meredith's panties in her hands, sitting on the bed of the trailer alone wearing his tuxedo jacket, a very large part of her attempted to deny their significance.

Even the most profound denial would have been shattered in the face of that.

Addison's barely cracked.

In the days after she left Derek, truth managed to seep in, but very little.

After she choked down enough alcohol so she couldn't feel the pain and she stared in the shiny mirror of her five-star hotel room bathroom, she denied the resemblance between herself and her mother.

When she was in bed with Mark, using him only to make herself feel better, she denied the similarities between herself and her father.

When she looked into the accusing eyes of Alex Karev as he waved the test results for the distressed mother at her, she denied that she had failed as a doctor.

When she looked Mark right in the eye and told him she didn't want him in Seattle, she denied the part of her inside that wanted to beg him to hold her.

And the night the divorce papers were officially signed and she did not remove her rings, she denied that it was because she was still in love with Derek.

But, the cracks in her steely denial were bound to grow, and eventually, break away.

It began when Callie told her she had slept with Mark.

The hurt was too palpable to be denied.

It was worsened when Derek came whistling into the office.

The hurt was too profound to be denied.

And it came to a final, violent end in the Chief's office.

She looked into Derek's eyes and saw the same indifference to her and their marriage that she saw so long ago in her father's.

The realization muted her, and it was only because Cristina Yang interrupted the discussion that she didn't completely break down.

Sunday was over. The denial was not, after all, invincible.

For the rest of the day, the truth and pain flooded her relentlessly, until she had no choice.

She still sat on the ferry for a good twenty minutes before she worked up the ability to actually do it.

When she finally got the strength to stand and walk to the deck of the boat, with each step distinct, acute stabs of severe loneliness cut into her until by the time she actually reached the rail, she wanted nothing more than to be rid of the rings.

Rid of the denial.

Free to find the truth.

She gave them one last regard, then raised her arm and pitched them into the air.

In the instant after they were gone from her hand, she was overcome with panic.

She watched them vault into the air and then arc down to make their descent, ending with a barely perceptible _plop. _They were gone before she could even allow the strangled cry in her throat to escape, and she was petrified.

She had been afraid, in the first instants, because the denial had been such an integral part of her, she wasn't sure if she would know how to live without it.

Tears spilled from her eyes, blotting out her vision. She dropped her head and watched the tears drop the steep fall, also into the water.

She had never been more alone in her entire life.

When the tears finally ended, she raised her head and looked upward at the sun. It burned her eyes at first in their sensitivity, but no more tears came.

It was setting, in the West.

That Sunday, and the Sunday she had been living for almost a year, was drawing to a close.

The denial was over by default.

She had no reason to deny anymore.

Catherine and her horrific hats were long gone.

Her father had died, also, and her mother spent most of her time Europe.

Derek was no longer her husband.

Addison, for the first time in her life, had no one but Addison to appease.

Things were going to be different. She was in control now.

So while she felt a deep loneliness, she also felt a very viable flame of hope inside herself as she watched the sun setting, because it wasn't just setting on her Sundays.

It was setting on her Saturdays and Fridays, too.

Things were going to be different.

* * *

**I should not be awake right now. I should be in bed. I'm going to New York City in exactly three and half hours, and I have to be at least coherent for that trip. But here I am. Writing this. Because if I didn't get the random idea I had in my head into words, there was no way I was going to sleep tonight. Plus, this story just needs to end. It's too sad to be unfinished. But, the point is, as always, I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for reading.**

**xo Bleu**


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